The Democrats’ recent loss of their supermajority in the California state Senate probably signals a return to stalemate when it comes to the big-ticket items on Sacramento’s legislative agenda.

Without 28 voting members in the chamber, Senate Democrats lack the two-thirds majority that allows them to pass tax increases and place constitutional amendments and other propositions on the ballot without picking up any of the 11 Republican members’ votes. What that means is that the Democrats certainly won’t be able to pass the tax increase they hoped to complete in this session or to place a crucial water bond or a proposal to create a permanent “rainy day” fund on next fall’s midterm ballot.

Given the critical importance of all three measures to the state’s economic welfare, you’d think that the appropriate thing to do would be to open negotiations with the Senate’s Republican caucus and see what sort of concessions would be required to bring at least a couple of its members on board. Considering the current nature of the California GOP, however, that almost certainly would be a fruitless and frustrating exercise. If the national Republicans have become the “party of no,” then this state’s GOP has degenerated into the “party of no, not ever, no matter what.”

As a result, California now is functionally a one-party state with not a single Republican in statewide office and overwhelming Democratic majorities in both legislative houses. While the incumbent Gov. Jerry Brown has done a masterful job of restraining the excesses that might so easily have flowed from one-party government, it’s an inherently unhealthy situation that inevitably breeds abuses. Our political system was designed to function through the checks and balances and compromises created by a civilly adversarial politics.

We no longer have that in California and the way in which the Democrats lost their supermajority points to the pathologies inherent in what amounts to a political monoculture. The Democrats still hold 28 seats in the Senate; it’s just two of their members have had to take “leaves of absence” because one has been convicted of multiple felonies and the other is under federal indictment. The former is Inglewood’s Rob Wright, who has been convicted of lying on his voter registration form and committing voter fraud in five consecutive elections. He’s hoping to have his conviction set aside before he’s sentenced in May. The latter is Montebello’s Ron Calderon who has been indicted on 24 federal corruption charges, involving allegations that he accepted at least $100,000 in bribes and gifts, including $88,000 in payoffs from an undercover FBI agent. He’s on leave to fight his case.

Now, of course, the two lawmakers — both of whom continue to receive their $95,000-a-year salaries — could do what once would have been regarded as the decent thing and resign. Even if innocent, the cloud of disgrace and suspicion hovering over them once would have been regarded as a disqualification from a position of public trust. This, though, is the age of narcissism and considerations of honor or a duty to something larger than the self seem somehow quaint. Resignations would have opened the way for Brown to call quick special elections, but in the absence of real pressure from the minority party, Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg — generally a highly effective and decent majority leader — has little incentive to push the two lawmakers further — though they have been stripped of their committee assignments. (The Senate hasn’t actually expelled a member since 1905, when it ejected four lawmakers convicted of bribery.)

Even if special elections were held in constituencies where the Democratic office-holders had disgraced themselves in this fashion, the fecklessness of the Republican opposition would guarantee a win by some other Democrat. Both Wright and Calderon occupy seats that virtually define the concept of “safe.” The former’s district is overwhelmingly African-American and went 80 percent for Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. Calderon’s district is heavily Latino and Obama rolled up 88 percent of its vote.

Still, those numbers are less a reflection of convincing Democratic successes than they are of the California GOP’s resolute flight from reality over the past years. In a state that once gave the nation two historically important Republican presidents — Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — it’s hard to believe that GOP registration has fallen to just 29 percent of the electorate. This, after all, was the state that gave birth to the ideas and style of the now iconic “Reagan Revolution” that revitalized contemporary American conservatism and created a party that could attract millions of blue-collar and socially conservative Democrats into crossing over.

Just how purposefully the state GOP has fled that onetime “big tent” was on display during its recent state convention, where delegates had the chance to offer an unofficial endorsement to one of the party’s two leading candidates to take on Brown, 75, who will seek an unprecedented fourth term in the fall. Obviously, that won’t be an easy assignment, since the incumbent is popular and already has amassed an $18 million campaign war chest. All of that might suggest that Laguna Beach investment banker Neel Kashkari, a former treasury official who oversaw the successful rescue of the nation’s banks after the Wall Street meltdown, would be worth a look. The son of Indian immigrants, he’s an American success story who has well-worked-out proposals to deal with some of the state’s most pressing issues, such as water, education, transportation and finance. In a state whose voters are overwhelmingly liberal on the social issues, he favors reproductive rights, marriage equality and reasonable gun control. His first interview at the convention was with a Spanish-language network and he enthusiastically addressed the party’s oldest gay organization, the Log Cabin Republicans.

The delegates, however, gave him a tepid reception and conferred their unofficial endorsement on one of the oddest figures in statewide politics, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who represents the mountain community of Twin Peaks in San Bernardino County. In a state where nearly half of whose residents are Latino, Donnelly entered public life as head of the rabidly nativist, anti-immigrant Minutemen. He categorically opposes all reproductive rights and is personally against marriage equality and is against any form of gun control. In fact, he’s currently on three years’ probation for attempting to carry an unregistered and loaded handgun onto an airliner. He publicly has compared President Barack Obama, who overwhelmingly carried California in the last election, to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Kim Jong Il. When his plastic manufacturing business failed, it was subject to a tax lien.

With qualifications like that, he might — with luck — carry maybe a dozen census tracts in November. With candidates like that, the California GOP is less like a serious party and more like a political suicide pact.

That’s unhealthy — not just for Republicans, but for all Californians.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.

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